In the age just past, which we can call the early adolescent stage of planetary consciousness, humanity had to learn to make a very crude kind of distinction between good and evil, between social and antisocial behavior, between constructive and destructive acts. This was a totally dualistic state, inevitable because the consciousness of the planet was not able to perceive anything beyond dualism. It was also a necessary preparation for the next age, the one you have now entered. You have to acquire the strength of character to withstand temptation before you can realize that nothing is being sacrificed by growing up, because your real interest cannot ever differ from that of others.

The laws and mores of civilization in the age just past hinged on this basic duality, thus on a limited vision of reality. At the same time this limited vision was a much needed testing ground. All the manifestations of strife and upheaval, natural as well as artificial, expressed this conflict between the seemingly divergent interests of the self and others. Now this age has come to an end. Those who have sacrificed for the good of all, for the sake of a divine principle, will find that this is no longer necessary, that a deeper level of truth can be reached, for you now see that what harms the self, harms others, and what harms others also harms the self. Those who have acted primarily on the selfish and destructive level must come to a change of heart if the powerful energies that are being released on the inner plane of the planet are to be creative and constructive for them. Otherwise they will create unbearable tensions that will culminate in crisis.

The planet Earth has come to a stage of development in which the old structure can no longer be maintained. It cannot bear the tensions and restrictions of the old limited consciousness. A new vision must be gained in which the self and others are perceived as one. You have to look for this new vision beneath the limited vision to which the immediate consciousness is so accustomed. This new vision brings enormous peace, security, joy, and self-expression. It is not an illusory image of wishful thinking; it is stark reality.

You all know, my friends, that the distinction between people who are still steeped in the old consciousness and those who share the new perception is not always simple, for humanity is not cut from one cloth. Many human beings are on the brink of change and need help and guidance to pull them over into the new. Even those who are by and large ready to let the new consciousness express itself through them, whose personality already embraces the new Christ consciousness, find areas within where they still maintain the old, selfish, narrow vision. Those are the areas you call your “problems.” Perhaps we can now see this in a different and more comprehensive light. It is too simple to say that these are “problems.” They express a rhythm of growth and expansion.

Some people are already prepared for this New Age of consciousness, and in this sense this consciousness already exists. They are the pioneers. They create a new civilization. The beginnings have already been made, in various places all over the Earth. There are also a considerable number of human beings who are not quite yet in the new consciousness but are capable of reaching that state. This requires very intense work with guidance. The way to do this is being presented to you through this channel. More of this preparation is needed all over the world. And it will come. Your task is very important, for you are not merely concerned with those human beings who have attained the new consciousness, who are pioneers in creating a new civilization. You are also called upon to undergo your own purification work, your own growth process, so that your inner vision will be enlarged and your present state of manifest consciousness will alter according to your seed plan. Then you can help others, in many different ways, to accomplish the same. There need not be a very strict differentiation between those who are in the old and those who are in the new. There are a number of human beings who at this stage of development are not ready to undergo the necessary discipline of the work. But there are more than you realize who might be able to do it but unfortunately do not do so. There are also many human beings who can and wish to widen and deepen their consciousness according to their plan.

This work is not sufficiently spread on the earth plane and it needs more emphasis. This will happen. Your own nucleus here can and will play an important role in this task, in exchanges with other New Age centers that are willing to accept the process of becoming and do not just let everyone stay wherever they are. Work needs to be done. This work of preparing the inner consciousness of more and more individuals for the inner reality to unfold really means very plainly just one thing: liberating God within you, liberating God within the general consciousness of humanity.

The God consciousness that existed in previous ages was always projected outward, as you well know. Then, as a necessary preparation, the pendulum had to swing to emphasis on the self. The individual had to give up God outside to assume full responsibility for the self. But to make the transition from the God outside to God inside, and bridge that gap in time and space, a transitory period of atheism or agnosticism had to come to prepare the individual for full autonomy and selfhood. This had to happen first only on the outer levels, for full autonomy and selfhood on all levels can exist only when God within is liberated and when your oneness with God has been found. That is reality.

Now, my friends, wherever the planet Earth resists the powerful energies and does not follow its seed plan, its development has to proceed differently from the development of those aspects of the planetary consciousness that are ready to embrace the new. This division is necessary, organic, and inevitable. Individuals who are blind to the meaning of the crisis that was caused by obstructing the movement will feel victimized by it and will insist that everything is hopeless. But those in the know will be aware of the real meaning of the crisis and will not fear it. They know it is a change that may, at the moment, present some difficulties in the process of adjusting to new modalities, but they also know that this means welcome liberation and greater joy.

Let us return for a moment to the concepts of good and evil, meaning by them that which is constructive and in accordance with divine truth and law, and that which is opposed to it. The rigid law that had to exist for the primitive consciousness of the past had to decree dos and don’ts, commands and prohibitions. The totally childish and self-indulgent consciousness does need such rules imposed from the outside. Without them there would have been chaos, and the most destructive impulses would have been acted out to a much greater degree. Such severity, however, also brought a certain rigidity and superficiality to human existence. Obeying rules blindly is a temptation to avoid thinking for oneself and struggling with the often more complex issues of inner morality. Blind obedience to rules enhances laziness of thinking, the easy way of not taking responsibility and avoiding the often necessary search that must precede true answers, enlightenment. This is why I so often stress in my guidance that your customary belief that one action is right and the other wrong is most of the time faulty. I have painstakingly shown you throughout the years that most of the time either alternative could be governed by the most sincere or the most dishonest motives. Only when you sort out the dishonest motives on both sides can you open the channel to your inner God and receive the guidance you require. This means labor, courage, search. Obeying the outer rule prevents this. So what I have shown you about how to approach such questions is truly an expression of the New Age consciousness that will spread much more over the planet as humanity develops.

I have also pointed out to you throughout the years how the dualistic approach creates confusion and distortion of truth in another way. Some people claim that a specific attitude to life is desirable, while its opposite is supposed to be undesirable. Others assert the contrary. Each group uses the distortion, exaggeration, and fanaticism of the other as a proof that their side is correct. For example, some say introspection is the only way of life, while outgoingness and extroversion are harmful and erroneous. Others claim the exact opposite. Still others believe only in active expression and reject all receptive, passive attitudes, and vice versa. Many other life attitudes are likewise divided. Whole philosophies are based on such divisions; painstaking treatises are written in which a lot of half-truths are used to present one side of the matter. Many issues meet this fate of rigid division. I have shown how the dualistic either/or is rigid, shortsighted and no longer applicable. However, this polarization was an inevitable byproduct of the rule system — rules which the primitive consciousness required in order to avoid destroying another human being willfully, blindly, and selfishly, in a state of emotional alienation where the other person’s pain was not experienced as real.

I do not say that humanity has now sufficiently progressed so that outer rules are no longer necessary. Obviously this is not yet true. There are always those who would still harm others willfully and selfishly, cruelly and irresponsibly, in spite of the rules from outside. But this applies only to the darkest, most undeveloped aspects of the lower self of the entity, individual as well as planetary. To an increasing degree the rules begin to make way for a new inner sense of morality and conscience. The Christ consciousness that evolves within brings humanity into a state in which sooner or later, little by little, outer rules will become superfluous. For the inner God knows what is truth, what is love, and what is divine reality, and the personality will act from that innermost center.

This can already be seen to a small degree. As you follow a psychological inner path in your emotional life, no rules are applicable — at least no rules from outside. But on your inner path you find the beauty of divine law working in utter perfection, as well as benign love and justice. The child, the lower self in you, may blindly rebel against the laws, but once you want to awaken, you must be overwhelmed by the grandeur of this divine scheme in which all is well, and there is nothing to fear, if you choose to see this plan and go with it. You know your inner truth; no one else can tell it to you. No one act is right or wrong per se, on that level. Yet it is also true at certain times that your inner plan, your divine self, wishes you, needs you to go into a certain direction and not in another. But this cannot be superimposed from the outside. Only when you go very deeply into yourself and transcend the rules, the adherence to public opinion, give up the facade and the self-interest that comes from the lower self, the need to please, as well as the need to rebel and to spite, will you find the ultimate truth. All outer help can show you only how to go deeply enough to recognize your investment in a false vision of reality. Those outside of you can often see the maze you cannot see and can therefore help you. But the ultimate realization is that of your own inner law, once you find your inner God.

The idea of the New Age points in this direction. The outer law is often parallel to the inner law. Many outer laws are manifestations of divine law, but have lost the dynamic connectedness with their divine origin and are therefore disconnected structures. When it comes to destructive acts of killing, stealing, or in other ways robbing others of their rights, there can be no question that the outer law is parallel to the inner law. But then we also encounter more complex situations, where the inner law is not that simple. This is where our new approach can bring forth the truth and reality of the divine law on an inner level.

At times you may find the outer law to be completely opposite to the inner law of God. A simple example on the crassest outer level of manifestation is the following: If you happen to live in a land whose government is corrupt and requires the individual to commit acts against humanity — that is, against God — to follow the outer law would be going against divine law. It requires a great deal of courage to stand up for the inner truth and defy the outer law. But people can lose themselves in a maze of inner confusion and can take refuge in the outer law, for that may be the easier way. By the same token, people could misuse the words I am saying in order to justify a lower-self trend to defy an outer law. Again, very close inspection of the real motives and attitudes is the only true answer. There are no rules about when to follow and when to break rules, or how to follow them.

The Christ consciousness is not rebellion and revolution; it is not, in itself, destruction of the old. It is reformulation and change, a new organization of eternal values which already existed in the old consciousness but which must be expressed in a new way in the New Age. The Christ consciousness brings a new morality that little by little wipes away the outer commandments, outer regulations and the outer written and unwritten laws. Laws are still necessary for quite a time in your terms, but the trend is in this direction. Where you act out your lower self, you need those laws to protect others. But where you have outgrown the lower self, you do not need to be told not to harm others, you know it, and you have no desire to do so.

In the more complex matters of personal relationships to self and others, the laws are already dissolving, for the new consciousness makes them superfluous. To the degree you allow God to awaken in you, outer laws will disappear. The laws of morality will be completely flexible. Each case is different. But for that you need the labor, courage and honesty of self-knowledge so that you cannot be corrupted by lower-self motives. You also need to take each individual issue separately and deal with it completely anew. That is the action of the adult, mature entity, and humanity is moving toward that goal. But you cannot do this when you resist change, for this flexible attitude requires a constantly changing world. Freedom and change are inseparable. Enslavement and rigidity are equally inseparable. If you want it to be all so simple that you won’t have to search and put energy and attention into whatever the issue may be, if you want it all handed to you, you need to deal with inflexible rules that confine and enslave. Only those who have overcome rebellion against authority because they are their own inner authority, because they have that honesty, can be free. That means embracing change. Each issue requires a new, different, very flexible approach. Situations that may appear similar may in fact be quite different and require an entirely new approach. So freedom is completely dependent on your ability to change.

This website is not created by, affiliated with, or endorsed by the
Pathwork Foundation, Gerard van de Lustgraaf is solely responsible for
this website and its content. The Pathwork Lectures are used and displayed on this website with support from the Pathwork Foundation. Pathwork ® is a registered service mark of
the International Pathwork Foundation.